Bloody Elbow June 2008 Meta-Rankings: Middleweight

Here are this month's middleweight Meta-rankings. The full explanation of how and why we assemble these is in the full entry.

Just please bear in mind that this is a compiling of 21 online fighter rankings, not our personal opinion. The goal is not to rank fighters, but rather to document how fighters are regarded by the MMA community.

For a long time, the 185lb division was the weak sister of the UFC. And Anderson Silva's utter domination of the division has helped maintain the illusion that the UFC is somehow weak at this weight.

But the fact that Silva has gone from being perceived as a talented also-ran who could never put together an impressive win streak in PRIDE to the undoubted king of the division speaks volumes about the UFC's 185lb division. After Silva's dismantling of Dan Henderson, very few commenters are claiming that there is anyone on the horizon at 185lbs who would present a serious threat to Silva.

Filho's weak performance against Chael Sonnen followed by a stint in rehab seems to have put to rest any lingering belief that he is the uncrowned #1 in the world. Lindland suffers from Henderson's loss as he presents a very similar skill-set. The former Olympian is also suffering from not being able to get quality fights in the division for a long time. He's fighting for Affliction in July, but beating Fabio Negao will hardly send him rocketing up the charts. Robbie Lawler is highly regarded but will have to face tougher competition than Scott Smith to get traction. Something that's unlikely to happen in 2008 with Elite XC.

DREAM's middleweight tournament is unlikely to send anyone to the top of the charts for a few reasons -- their top fighter Yoshihiro Akiyama had to sit it out with injuries; the perennially over-rated Denis Kang lost in the first round; Ronaldo "Jacare" Souza is a new comer to top flight international competition; and Jason "Mayhem" Miller lost to Jacare. Ironically Mayhem's loss seems to have moved him up rather than down in the rankings. We'll see how long that lasts. The winner of the tournament will likely rise into the top five, especially if it's Mousasi.

Several rankings also have kept Nate Marquardt ahead of Thales Leites, despite his loss to the Brazilian. It's funny how that works. And yes, haters, Jason McDonald's only on here because MMA Ranks has him way too high at #4. No one else even has him in their top 10.

This is a purer and simpler Meta-Rankings, and we believe the most accurate informative rankings anywhere on the web.

Because opinions are like assholes -- everybody has one and they all stink -- we don't put up our own subjective fighter rankings, we compile and average the rankings of every credible or popular source we could find online. The full list of sources is in the extended entry.

Note that the points are out of a possible 210.

We retooled our approach to include more sources. We also eliminated the weighting we were doing to favor statistical and fan-voting sites.

The goal is to show how the MMA community rates the fighters, not to bore you with our opinions.

Note that we only include fighters who made the top ten of one of our source sites. That creates some obvious distortions at the bottom of our rankings -- Jason Mcdonald for example is not even considered top 20 by most sources, but somebody out there considers him a top 10 middleweight.

We combined the following heavyweight top 10 rankings: Wamma, MMA Fighting, MMA-ELO, MMA Ranks, Full Contact Fighter, TAGG Radio, 411 Mania, MMA Weekly, Sherdog, Cage Potato, MMA Madness, MMA on Tap, Five Ounces of Pain, FightMatrix, MMA Playground, HD Net/Inside MMA, MMA-ValeTudo Japan, Brawl Sports, Total MMA, Fighters Magazine and Figure Four Online -- giving 10 points for a first place rank, 1 point for a tenth place ranking.

The following sources were checked but were not current enough for inclusion: MMA News, InsideFighting, World Fight.